Watch this video about feminism as a men's issue.

A powerful delusion - a.k.a. FANTASY

Many of my fellow human trafficking activists like to talk about how the sex industry peddles illicit fantasy and imparts sex addiction.  It's taken as fact by social conservatives and many in "the movement" that sex vendors, by producing porn, have created a need.  It is seen as a need which, by its nature, intensifies in the same way as the chemical addictions process.  Due to this intensification, it is argued that sex peddlers are able to stay in a lucrative business.  The idea that consumers have no ability to control  their use is inadvertently advanced.  Sex addictionologists have been the most invested and active in leading the conversation about helping users overcome their compulsions to use porn. Such professionals have much to say that is useful, valuable and thoughtful. Nonetheless, I find the addictions framework with respect to sex to be too reductionistic and unfairly pathologizing of men, in  general as base, appetite-driven biological phenomena.  I am invested in a more honoring, heroic if you will, paradigm that acknowledges the creative capacity imparted to men as carriers of the Divine image. Maybe we have been wasting our energy over-analyzing "unhealthy" or "sinful" behaviors when we could have been advancing a more balanced and God-affirming, life-giving way to conceptualize our sexuality and eroticism.  Let's not loose sight of the fact that sex brings life, and not just with respect to propagation of children.  It validates connection, life, intimacy and playfulness to the couple. 

Aside from an addiction framework, consider what is the devastating impetus to damaging sexual fantasies. (*Noteworthy is that not all fantasy is unhealthy or sinful - a point which I may someday discuss further.   Fantasy can be the impetus for creative endeavors.  For a clinical discussion about the potential of erotic fantasy to heal check out this article by Esther Perel.  Still, here I am talking about common illicit fantasies.)  It is sometimes argued that men use power to get sex and that they disempower women through sex. But sex IS itself powerful. It's not even evil that's inherent in our sexuality but its power that causes us trepidation.  Some have argued that porn kills. Yes, that’s true to some extent. But porn use can feel so exhilarating. It doesn’t feel like it’s killing. It feels like it’s invigorating and giving power. Is the driving factor in indulgence of fantasy that users are somehow already dead or emotionally dismembered? I believe fantasy is a sometimes a desperate encompassing attempt to enliven, reconnect and feel powerful when men aren’t supported, persuaded or socialized to other truly viable options. To such guys sex is a socially acceptable vehicle for transmuting their deepest longings for significance. When they don't know significance otherwise - due to castrating experiences - the fantasy yields immense power even if it is ultimately and knowingly a counterfeit power.

Psychologist Dr. Ley wrote the following article at the request of the guy who runs the website quitporngetgirls: Article here!

Oh wow! Discernment. This has a lot of truth mixed in with some sadly misinformed and familiar-sounding information. The porn industry has oft said that society benefits from porn through decreased sex crimes as availability of erotica goes up. Well that doesn't exactly take into account the staggering statistics regarding sex trafficking and illegal materials that are produced sort of in conjunction with the legal stuff. At present some 300,000 children in America alone are at risk for commercial sexual exploitation. I have met a number of women who've been involved in making this stuff, and believe me, it's not a "victimless crime." If it looks like it would be painful - guess what!   That's not Hollywood special effects. It DOES hurt.  To claim that as access to porn goes up violence against women and children goes down is absolute damnable BS!

However, I agree with Dr. Ley's assertion that sex addiction is a made-up paradigm. While engaging a twelve-step approach has helped countless individuals take responsibility for their compulsions, absent a more comprehensive framework, it is limited in its   broad applicability. I absolutely concur with the author that it's not pathological to like sex, like frequent sex or high intensity sex. What porn offers many is permission to plumb the depths of their own sense of meaning and purpose present in their own (again not pathological) fantasies mostly free from judgement and shame. Until a more satisfying and life- affirming, Godly alternative is convincingly advanced, I believe we will continue to see individuals engaging in problematic and ego-dystonic use of porn. Porn is the "brave new world" where people can normalize/legitimize their deepest yearnings and struggles. Christians offer hope by actually listening to these struggles and lifting burdens, being transparent and real that life includes suffering but also freedom and redemption. Our task is not to prematurely shut down the explicit fantasy but to as quickly as possible help our brothers and sisters move away from engaging /entertaining thoughts about the compulsive (external flesh and blood) act and move toward searching out the underlying obsession (rulers/authorities/powers of this dark world/ spritiual forces in the heavenly realm). Clearly, staring down the face of evil by wrestling with the darkness that holds people captive is much more frightening than just shutting down the external problem moralistically. But we have a sinless high priest who empathizes with our struggles who permits us to approach the throne of grace confidently that we can find mercy and grace in our time of need.

The issue of porn is debated from polarization and the usual tendency to want to legislate freedom and morality absent the ability to instigate genuine transformation. I'm hoping for discourse among my concerned and God-fearing friends and colleagues but at present, I feel like a voice in the dark. Sex addiction is a misnomer that doesn't get to the heart of the issue. In all too many cases, it is an excuse or distraction from dealing with the core issues.  Many evangelicals will recall that James Dobson met with serial rapist and murderer Ted Bundy on death row in order to highlight the dangers of porn.  As though porn, rather than sociopathy - or Ted Bundy himself, was the reason those women were killed!  Now the Cleveland kidnapper is trying to pull the same deceptive wool over our eyes.  The evangelical position of the last 40 years has defaulted to legislating morality, and has therefore played a role in overplaying an inadequate reference point.    It is curious to me that EVERY well-known activist on the issue of sex trafficking, those that are changing policy and effectively transforming lives out of sex slavery are women who profess redemption and faith in Jesus. Furthermore, they don't always look and sound like the church ladies we have been accustomed to.   They are all survivors of the sex trade in some form themselves and as such reject the silliness of modesty/purity/virginity cults and rather seek radical sexual transformation and (dare I say?) liberation!   Women don't bear sole responsibility for evoking lust from men.  And their worth as women isn't centered in their  virginal qualities anymore than it is in their sexual attributes.  Telling women how to dress is as unproductive as telling men not to look at dirty pictures.  It just doesn't get to the underlying person in either case.

This is a men’s issue as well as a women’s issue. So I'd really like to know what the guys have to say.  Chime in by clicking the words "Comments so far" below.

Not Today?

 Ok - so there's another Christian film in recent release.  Not Today  I am simply mentioning it because I was intrigued that a Quaker church - Yorba Linda Friends produced it.  Not having seen it, I'd guess it's an important film just because it deals in some compassionate manner with Sex Trafficking.  It exposes the sex trade in India.  Video responses to it were that many attendees were unaware that this goes on. So  now they are aware that it goes on - in India.  I got the sense that the movie didn't quite effectively raise anyone's awareness that it is a global and local issue.

My friends at Cherished and I are very keen to help those in the DOMESTIC sex trade.  The issue of human trafficking is one for every locale, including yours.  It is not isolated only to foreign girls and women who are sold by family members due to dire, crushing poverty.  To be clear, the global issue of human trafficking is near to my heart.  I believe it is time we considered how our daily decisions impact persons half a world away.  The same day the garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed and killed 622 of the world's poorest people inside, I had just purchased underwear that bore "made in Bangladesh" tags.  How can I know?   I read the news after my purchase.  Sobering. It's not a consideration I wish to easily dismiss. 

Yet, I am rather more interested in dually serving local women in any area of the sex trade and in raising awareness about our own attitudes towards "throwaway" people - those not seen and therefore dismissed in their own communities than I am about jumping into a movement because its getting some media buzz.  Remember?   I didn't see a movie or hear a speech about the current issue of human trafficking. God laid it on my heart to do a web search: "How to reach a stripper for Jesus".  From there I've been schooled about sex trafficking.  Awareness is important, but exceedingly difficult to raise the closer one gets to home.   The idea of little girls in literal chains pulls at our heartstrings. Chains around the mind are just as real. A girl-child on the street is no more free than a girl in a brothel.  Stockholm Syndrome is real.

I've learned  that I've been doing this work since I started in the field of psychology but now it's with a new awareness. I was blind to the issue of human trafficking as it occurs here because I've been socialized, as an American, that girls who are prostitutes here choose it, that they are bad promiscuous girls who like sex and who prey on ordinary joes or johns. I've bought into the nonsense that they are "rebellious teens" who need to be arrested and held responsible for their crime.  While I recognized that many in the sex trade have attachment disorders, what I missed was that being sold/pimped is not part of a psychiatric constellation of "conduct disorder."  It isn't, as I assumed, an issue of agency.  It is an issue of slavery.  The issues of poverty and women's rights (yes, I AM using feminist buzz words - more on that one later) are very much at the root of sexual exploitation.

Parenthetically: If you admonish me that sin is, I will have to ultimately agree with you. But then I challenge you with "stewardship."  I'm not talking about an Al-Gore-ian ideology of stewardship but a biblical prompting about what you are doing with the talents/gifts God has blessed you with.  I'd hope you would be moved with compassion to look beneath the surface where blaming and shaming resides, and begin critically to delve into the ravishes of a world system that aims to rob us all of innocence by employing the enemy's tools of judgement, blindness, hunger, pain, loneliness, trauma, nakedness, homelessness, etc.  The gifts and blessings I enjoy are (Thank Jesus!) financial security, community, education, health, security/protection.  It is much I have received.  Therefore much is to be expected.  My role is MUCH less to point out sin in an exploited woman's life and MORE to respond to God's call to welcome the least of these.

Back to my main point: Wherever you find prostitution, when you look deeper, you find lack of real opportunity for girls.  So much focus is given to trafficking as a foreign issue that we become blind to what it looks like in our own neighborhoods.  It is too "exciting" and "sexy" to think about rescuing little girls from Asian brothels so that the issue of our own foster kids (and such) get pimped and sold.  And that while having the double insult of bearing the shunning and rejection for being prostitutes. Does anyone know a little girl who looks forward to growing up and being raped and used by men multiple  times a day?  It is no more a "choice" for the girls on Sierra Highway or any town's prostitution "track"  than it is for a Cambodian girl.  Our girls are enslaved in a system that punishes her for prostitution - average age of entry here is 12- when she's not even a legal age to consent to sex.  The arbitrary distinction between an underage girl being arrested for prostitution and a man being arrested for statutory rape is whether or not money is exchanged.  Injustice.  She gets punished for being complicit in her own rape/exploitation.  Pimps and johns literally and figuratively "get off."

This HAS to change.  But maybe it doesn't necessarily change in the big dramatic manor depicted by brothel raids or even prostitution sweeps.  Maybe it changes when we make the choice to notice - to see - someone.  Maybe it changes when we refuse to dismiss someone or presume to know what their "choice" is.  Maybe it changes when rather than going along with the world's system, we submit to Jesus and do the thing that alarms the Pharisees.  Just maybe?

Let

Ok this thought hit me as I am listening to Frank Viola today.  (Besides my local pastor,  my favorites include Allistair Begg  and Frank Viola, among others!)

In the creation accounts in Genesis, God repeatedly says "Let. . ."   He creates - lets-
and then He rests.  It isn't until the Gospels that He says, "It is FINISHED!" 

Creation is not complete, that is, finished until it is consummated in Jesus.

God saw all that he had made. It was good. But it was not good for man to be alone. And creation isn't finished until Jesus and the church become one, "that they may be one as I and the Father are one."

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